The Age of Agile Must End: "As far as manifestos go, this is one of the more pathetic documents ever created. It lists four "Values" and twelve "Principles." They may have been well-intentioned at their inception — that intention was to treat developers as humans, not cogs in a machine — but now we’ve gone full circle. These principles have devolved into something caustic for organizations. Viewed now, they’re variations on a theme of how a scrum pod can absolve themselves of any accountability.
"The combination of Agile principles and Scrum practices is disastrous for startups. These are operational directives from management; designers, PM’s, and engineers are not self-organizing and choosing to work this way. It’s all in the name of an "MVP" and time to market; this is what happens. Every. Time."
"Real options" underlie agile practices: Whether people realise it or not, "freedom to choose" is the underlying principle behind many of the agile practices. We call this principle Real Options. An understanding of Real Options allows us to develop and refine new agile practices and take agile into directions it hasn't gone before. Real Options also help us understand why some people resist some of the practices. (I disagree with the premise, but the rest of the article has some good weight to it.)
"Software Development Waste": "The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe different kinds of waste in software development."
Agile Planning: From Ideas to Story Cards - Launch School
Trunk-Based Development: Pushing to main/master ain't all as bad as it's cracked up to be. "A source-control branching model, where developers collaborate on code in a single branch called ‘trunk’ *, resist any pressure to create other long-lived development branches by employing documented techniques. They therefore avoid merge hell, do not break the build, and live happily ever after."
Pair Programming Guide, including the Pair Programming Antipatterns
"The 'tag team': tools, tasks and roles in collaborative software development" (PDF)
Last modified 14 December 2025